Helado Negro and his faithful music-making companions recreate the sounds of This Is How You Smile for Live at KCRW, a live recording – and limited edition vinyl release – of the ensemble’s inspired performance on Jason Bentley’s Morning Becomes Eclectic radio show.
To coincide with the occasion, Helado Negro shares a new video for “Seen My Aura” from This Is How You Smile. Watch the video, a near perfect manifestation of the song’s lyrics directed by Jason Evans, below:
Helado Negro and the Smile Band’s Live At KCRW will be available in a limited vinyl edition from Helado Negro on a spree of upcoming US and international tour dates and from RVNG Intl. on November 15, 2019. Learn more here.
Ahead of Respires’ release, Ka Baird travels across Europe for a month starting next week, returning home to Brooklyn for a special 40-channel presentation of the album at Future Space on Thursday, November 7.
In the meantime, watch a video for “Spiritus Operis” directed by Camilla Padgitt-Coles below:
Ka Baird’s Respires will be released October 25, 2019 on vinyl and digital formats. Learn more here.
Each month, we invite an artist from the cast of characters that color the RVNG, Beats In Space, and Freedom To Spend universe to compile 15 – 20 tracks that are resonating with them.
From Dylan Moon, to you ~
As Damon Krukowski points out, one of Spotify’s many shortcomings is the lack of context—comprehensive metadata—present in its catalog and discovery models. Hopefully, this playlist and these notes are a way of personally contextualizing some songs. The songs, mostly guitar music, influenced my Album / are influencing me. Another thread here is singular, intricate harmony in the field of ‘pop’ music.
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Small Talk – The music of Scritti Politti is so intensely polished, concentrated and catchy that it’s almost sinister (especially when considering Green Gartside’s punk past). The synth lines dip in n out like dolphins :’o
Go West (Girly Sound Version) – Liz Phair’s songs can be deceptively simple sounding—there’s a very weird chord in here!
My Friend – Emily Yacina’s songs have such a special dreaminess about them…sparse chord voicings and tonal ambiguity
Film’s Camera – Matt Werth showed me Lilys. There are all these layers of superimposed harmony… staggering.
That’s Pretty Clean Instrumental – There’s something *magical* about the patter of analog drum machine recorded to worn out tape.
Near – (Sandy) Alex G blasts apart the crystalized pop structures to find an amorphous constellation of tones.
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – I don’t know that much about The Dead catalog, but this Bob Dylan cover is an old favorite. The structure of “Song For Jerry” was inspired by Dylan’s use of the lyrical refrain.
Best, Dylan
RIYL-ty Bytes is updated by a different artist each month. If you like something, save it to your library.
Kevin’s a legend. If not already in your world, with absolute, unequivocal certainty in ours. Kevin O’Neill has been foundational to RVNG’s label architecture, and Beats In Space, Freedom To Spend, and Commend’s adjacent engineering, devoting his wonderful and wildly diverse design to (almost) every visual moment that has happened within and surrounding our catalog / cosmos.
Earlier this year, AIGA published a piece reflecting on the symbiosis of Will Work For Good, the design studio that Kevin co-helms with his creative and life partner Karisa Senavitis, and RVNG, which congeals around our formative immersions in punk rock / DIY ethics and our shared interest in communicating consciousness through art but also levity. Without Kevin, we’d surely be lost, not only for the creative collaboration, but also of a dear friend and brilliant mind.
That’s a startling reality that we face. Kevin was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2015. The onset of the M.S. was as mild as M.S. can be, but still a serious life adjustment while Kevin underwent numerous diagnoses and test. The real impact of the disease came last year, when Kevin suffered a relapse and a loss of mobility. While he was able to rebound from an earlier relapse, this more recent regression left Kevin to a long rehabilitation process, dependent on trekking poles to walk, and with a deep scare that another relapse may have even more severe physical impact.
Karisa, ever an enduring, compassionate force (she also helped with our successful Pauline Anna Strom rehabilitation efforts not so long ago), has launched a GoFundMe for Kevin to raise funds for Kevin to receive a Multiple Sclerosis treatment called HSCT (hematopoietic stem cell transplantation). From Karisa, “this treatment has been shown to halt the progression of M.S. for many patients, but it has only been available in U.S. clinical trials (which are extremely hard to be accepted into) or outside the U.S. — making it expensive and not covered by insurance.” Heeding his doctor’s ominous warning, this is a critical juncture for Kevin to receive the stem cell transplant, while he can still physically recover from the process.
M.S. is a chronic disease of the brain and spinal cord that affects about 400,000 people in the US alone. Probably people within your family, or that you know. We know that contributing to fund this treatment for Kevin represents one person’s journey with this terrible disease, but we hope it raises a general awareness around M.S., too. This is a first of a few measures that we have in mind to move this fundraising effort along, and one that is immediately impactful. It’s an ambitious goal for an ambitious treatment, but we are dedicated to meeting it so Kevin can make the trip to Mexico in January 2020.
If you’ve appreciated RVNG’s design, and a core essence of our releases over the years, or are just interested in seeing an excellent human being achieve this potentially life-changing event, we can’t thank you enough for supporting this campaign:
serenitatem, the fifteenth installment of RVNG’s intergenerational FRKWYS series, joined Visible Cloaks with Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano, trailblazers of the Japanese environmental / avant garde music scene in the 1980s and 90s.
The four musicians met in Tokyo at Sounduno Studios in December 2017, at the tail end of Visible Cloaks’ first Japanese tour, to commence work on serenitatem. Following the album’s release this past April, the quartet performed serenitatem live in Japan for the first time this June and will tour Europe together this fall.
Watch the video for “Atelier (Live)” from the world premiere of serenitatem in Tokyo, directed by Road Izumiyama here
Blending the primal with the alien, the future with the past, the experimental with skeletal traditional forms, “Symanimagenic” is a track lost in time and place. Composed with the intention of self-displacement, Ka Baird sought to “alchemize [sound] into a wild conduit of energy, essence, and spirit.”
This is the first single ahead of her sophomore album release, Respires, available from RVNG Intl. on October 25, 2019.
Anatolian Weapons returns with an EP of brand new remixes following June 2019’s debut To The Mother of Gods with Seirios Savviadis.
Featuring new takes on key album track “Ofiodaimon” by Tolouse Low Trax, Mr TC and Mekine U Teksi – as well as an instrumental dub take by Anatolian Weapons – the remix collection further opens the third eye that the album’s rapturous Levantine grooves first channeled.
The EP unfolds a with a collaboration between Germany’s seasoned Tolouse Low Trax and Anatolian Weapons, a cyclic, languorous mid-tempo stomp that hones in on microscopic elements of the original, swirling and constant in its drive, falling deep into the Kraut-fantasies that the album version flirts with and beckoned by the vocals of Savvaidis like calls from beyond.
